Executive Chef

The Huntley Santa Monica Beach Hotel stands as a premier luxury hospitality destination located in the vibrant coastal city of Santa Monica, California. This refined coastal retreat uniquely blends residential calm with elevated hospitality, offering guests sweeping ocean and city views that create a memorable and intimate experience. Featuring 204 thoughtfully designed guest rooms and suites, The Huntley caters to discerning travelers seeking both comfort and sophistication in a modern, design-forward setting. Among its distinguished amenities is The Penthouse Restaurant, a signature rooftop venue celebrated for its panoramic views, vibrant ambiance, and elevated culinary offerings. The hotel also serves as a coveted location for meetings, private celebrations, and intimate weddings, ensuring that each event is crafted with impeccable attention to detail and personalized service in an iconic Southern California environment.

We are currently seeking an accomplished Executive Chef to lead the culinary operations across four unique food and beverage outlets within the property. This includes oversight of a full-service restaurant, in-room dining, café operations, and a comprehensive banquets and events program. The Executive Chef role demands a hands-on culinary leader who brings extensive experience in managing culinary teams while consistently delivering exceptional food quality and guest satisfaction. This position plays a crucial role in aligning culinary strategies with The Huntley’s mission, vision, and values, fostering a culture of teamwork, professionalism, and continuous development.

The Executive Chef at The Huntley is responsible for driving culinary innovation and operational excellence. This role requires responsibility for menu development, recipe creation, and execution across multiple meal periods and event formats, ensuring that offerings reflect creativity, ingredient integrity, technical mastery, and operational efficiency. The chef will ensure excellent food quality in presentation and flavor across all outlets, maintaining rigorous recipe standards and staying on top of culinary trends to keep menus fresh and relevant.

Operational leadership plays a significant part in this role, overseeing all back-of-house functions to ensure consistent and timely service that meets the highest quality, safety, and brand standards. The Executive Chef must foster a calm and decisive leadership presence during peak service times, taking ownership of problem-solving and compliance with health and sanitation regulations. Building scalable kitchen systems that support multiple service models is essential to maintaining consistency and efficiency.

In addition, the Executive Chef will lead the culinary execution for all banquets and events, collaborating with sales and event teams to design menus that are both exceptional and profitable. Maintaining banquet food quality that matches restaurant standards while handling volume, timing, and cost constraints highlights the chef’s ability to balance excellence with operational discipline.

Team leadership and development are core priorities for this role. The Executive Chef will recruit, train, and mentor kitchen leadership and staff, nurturing sous chefs and outlet leaders to operate independently with a shared commitment to high standards. Creating a culture of accountability, respect, and teamwork is essential to sustaining a motivated and professional culinary team. Performance evaluations and coaching are conducted regularly to support continuous growth and engagement.

Financial and administrative oversight also constitute a significant component of the position. The Executive Chef is accountable for managing food costs, labor efficiency, inventory control, and waste reduction across all culinary outlets. Responsibility extends to vendor management, procurement, budgeting, forecasting, and maintaining accurate operational documentation. Enforcing team accountability for quality, consistency, cost control, and cleanliness ensures financial health and operational excellence.

Collaboration with front-of-house leadership and hotel management teams is vital to delivering a seamless guest experience. The Executive Chef partners with marketing, events, and sales to uphold and elevate The Huntley and The Penthouse brand standards at every culinary touchpoint. This role demands a blend of creative vision, technical expertise, operational proficiency, and inspiring leadership within a fast-paced, luxury hospitality environment. The ideal candidate brings five to seven-plus years of senior culinary leadership experience within multi-outlet hotel or resort operations, demonstrating a fine-dining or luxury hospitality background with advanced cooking skills and strong business acumen. Flexible scheduling is required, including mornings, evenings, weekends, and special events, with an emphasis on supporting an outstanding guest experience in a service-driven setting.